Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean by Randy M. Browne (review)

Colonial Berbice, the subject of Randy Browne's exceptional new book, was a hellish place. Rain pelted down incessantly, flooding the low-lying lands that lined the Berbice River. The scorching heat, rising to 90°F in the summer, made the waterlogged colony a steaming inferno. Dutch colonists forced almost five thousand enslaved people to toil for them in this hostile environment during the eighteenth century. But it would be the British, who conquered Berbice in 1802, who would transform the river into a true plantation colony by importing tens of thousands of captive Africans. Ambitious planters forced them to drain swamps, clear tropical forests, and plant sugar, coffee, and cotton. Wading up to their knees in water, stung by mosquitoes, lashed by whites and drivers, starved, and pushed to the limits of physical endurance, these captives' lives were truly miserable. Thousands perished prematurely, principally of diarrhea, but also through malaria, fevers, and exhaustion. That the British Caribbean was a "Reaper's Garden" will be familiar to the readers of numerous recent works.¹ But Browne builds on this work by vividly and sensitively describing enslaved people's "struggle to survive" (3) in this wretched world.

Browne studies Berbice both because it was exceptionally deadly and because its peculiar legal system has generated a uniquely detailed set of sources. Under Dutch law, Berbice had an office of the fiscal, a magistrate whose duties included the implementation of a 1772 code limiting masters' power over their slaves. When the British took Berbice they continued to enforce the Dutch code; in 1826, Parliament also dispatched a protector of slaves to Berbice, tasked with implementing increasingly powerful ameliorative laws. Enslaved people threw down their tools and marched to the fiscal or protector of slaves to complain of ill treatment and have their master sanctioned or fined. Clerks transcribed and preserved enslaved people's testimony. This phenomenal source base comprises, as Browne notes, "the single largest archive of first-person testimony from and about enslaved people in the Americas," making Berbice "the most well-documented slave society in the Americas" (5).

Browne uses theses sources to examine the lives of Berbician slaves in unparalleled detail. Drawing on Walter Johnson's influential "On Agency," Browne does not assume that slaves constantly and actively resisted the plantation system.² Instead, he argues that they used various strategies to "survive," in his oft-repeated word. Browne first exposes enslaved people's concerted attempts to have their master's "right … to punish" (44) limited, reducing the chances that they would be maimed or killed. Browne likewise explores enslaved people's "moral economy" (157) regarding allowances of food, clothing, and the ownership of property—necessities for survival. Men and women elevated themselves within the slave community to reduce the severity of their work and access food and clothing. Enslaved men became drivers to improve their living conditions and extend their lives beyond those of field slaves. Drivers were, however, always at risk of being toppled from their positions of authority by demanding planters or ostracized by resentful slaves. Other individuals sought to gain money and power by practicing obeah, an "Afro-Caribbean spiritual complex of divination, healing, and harming" (132). Slaves viewed obeah men "with suspicion and fear" (136), but they also turned to them to resolve disputes and to identify murderers within the community. Planters feared the challenge to their authority that obeah posed and brutally executed those they found guilty of the practice.³ Turning to gender relations, Browne highlights the warping effects of both white and black men's patriarchal attitudes on enslaved families. Enslaved women had little opportunity for redress when their husbands beat them, chased them from their home, or deprived them of property. The slave community Browne depicts was distorted by white power and fraught with social and gendered tensions, as each person did what was necessary to survive.

Browne's unparalleled examination of the difficult lives of enslaved people makes...